


Don't Let the Night Shake You

by victoriousscarf



Series: Stars and Cinders [4]
Category: DCU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Gen, I already regret everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 17:15:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6433195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/victoriousscarf/pseuds/victoriousscarf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Find another master,” Bruce told the boy the next day he came.</p><p>“It's not about me finding a master,” the boy said. “It's about you having someone. Anyone.”</p><p>“I've been alone before,” Bruce snarled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Let the Night Shake You

“You need a padawan,” the boy said in front of him.

“That is the last thing I ever need again,” Bruce replied, and his hands were folded into his robe sleeves because somehow that made it feel less like he was falling apart. He wasn't sure what this boy was doing in the healing ward to begin with. He was small, and his features were sharp, and he was older than he looked. On the edge of becoming a padawan or being sent to the corps.

Bruce felt somehow weak sitting on the hospital bed while that boy narrowed his eyes at him.

“You're killing yourself.”

“That's not your business,” Bruce replied.

“Yes it is,” the boy said. “I'll prove it to you.”

And he left so Bruce could pretend the conversation hadn't happened at all.

Could close his eyes and sink down again into the pit of his own pain and despair.

-0-

Dick had been forced on him, and had been the best thing to ever happen to him. No matter how it fell apart, or the way Dick didn't speak to him anymore, it was still the best thing to ever happen to him. To have earned and held that affection, even for a few years was worth the stars in the sky.

Barbara had been his second padawan, but only in the most technical sense. When Master Gordon had died, Bruce had accepted his padawan to see her through the last year and then her trials. She was good friends with Dick and having her around both soothed the hurt of Dick's hole in his life and made it worse at the same time.

She was bright though, studious and as good in the field as she was in the library or playing with technology. Her yellow lightsaber made Bruce smile.

They were connected by the threads of a tenuous bond, and he knew he had only made her more and more angry since her trials. She blamed him in part for Dick drifting to the outer rim and staying there. She accused him of being too harsh and cold, and yet came whenever he asked for help.

Bruce could never be thankful enough for Barbara and even more could never properly express just how much he was.

-0-

His third padawan, the second he chose had been Jason.

And in the end all he had left of Jason was sprawled graffiti on a Sith ruin and his lightsaber, left on the stone alter to mock him.

-0-

“Find another master,” Bruce told the boy the next day he came.

“It's not about me finding a master,” the boy said. “It's about you having someone. Anyone.”

“I've been alone before,” Bruce snarled.

“Not like this you haven't,” the boy said. Bruce refused to learn his name because even that felt like too much of a capitulation to what he wanted.

“You have no idea of what you speak,” Bruce said, and he flicked his lightsaber on, trying to ignore the child in front of him. But when he turned back around, hours later, the boy was still sitting there and watching him.

He walked out of the training rooms without looking back.

-0-

The boy followed him. Bruce had been tracking down a smuggler in the lower levels of Coruscant and he had no idea how this child had followed him.

But he had left his back exposed, standing over the smuggler and roaring at him. He sensed the other presence at his back too late, turning his head in time to see the gun knocked out of the other gangster's hands, the boy pale faced and determined behind him with one hand out stretched.

Bruce flung the gangster viciously into the wall, before whirling back on the smuggler.

The boy at least had the decency to look afraid when Bruce turned back to him.

“You were in danger,” he said, but his face was white and his hands shook. He folded them in front of himself, much like Bruce often hid his hands in his robe sleeves. Bruce hated that he noticed.

“That is no reason for a padawan to put themselves in danger,” Bruce snarled. “Especially one not tied to any master.”

There was a tiny tremor through the boy's frame. But when his eyes lifted they were determined and hard. “You need me.”

“I am a Jedi,” Bruce said.

“You need my help.”

“You are a _child_.”

But the boy stared at him, his mouth thin and shaking and refusing to look away. “I will not leave you to the darkness I see,” he said and Bruce froze.

“We must return to the temple,” he said finally. He needed time to look away from this boy, to process what he just said.

-0-

“What's your name?” he asked finally, when the boy was folded in front of him, his hands on his crossed knees. It felt like a betrayal of the last two boys he had failed, and the girl who he had never had the time to hurt.

“Tim,” the boy said, and Bruce closed his eyes.

He opened them again, and Tim was still so small and slight he almost kicked him back out into the hallway. Surely he was not old enough to be taken as anyone's padawan, let alone his own. “What did you mean?” he asked and Tim couldn't quite meet his eyes.

“Since I was,” he stopped, had to restart. “I've always had dreams.”

Bruce remembered Jason and his nightmares. When he had asked, Jason had shook his head, shrugged it off with circles under his eyes. “They're nothing,” he said. “Just bad dreams.” And Bruce had failed to demand if they were dreams or visions.

“They come true,” Tim said. “They always seem—the masters tell me that the future is ever changing. That things can _change_ ,” and he said it viciously, like he had to believe it. “But so far all of them have come true.”

“Have there been many?” Bruce asked in concern.

“Enough,” Tim whispered and looked at him. “And I'm going to change this one.”

“No one should be my padawan,” Bruce said.

Tim met his eyes. “You need someone,” he said and then, less firm. “You need me,” and he looked so nervous as he said it Bruce wanted to pick him up and shove him out of the room. He was too young, too kind still.

“I could find another padawan,” he said and Tim met his eyes again, something flashing deep within his own.

“No,” he said. “At least, you couldn't find another one like me. We could,” and he frowned. Bruce wanted to know if it was about his visions or something else.

“You sound like you need me as much as I supposedly need you,” Bruce said and the openness on Tim's face was answer enough of that.

Bruce had never been able to turn away a child that needed him.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Like this breaks the pattern of Bruce's padawan stories that Jason and Dick set up because Tim's eventual reason for leaving Bruce is way more complicated than I want to even fit in this one shot. 
> 
> Which is about where the "I regret everything" starts coming in.


End file.
